Book 15: "Memory of Fire: Genesis" by Eduardo Galeano
Saturday, April 30th, 2011 09:41![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kittiwakeI don’t know to what literary form this voice of voices belongs. Memory of Fire is not an anthology, clearly not; but I don’t know if it is a novel or essay or epic poem or testament or chronicle or . . . Deciding robs me of no sleep. I do not believe in the frontiers that, according to literature’s customs officers, separate the forms.
I did not want to write an objective work—neither wanted to nor could. There is nothing neutral about this historical narration. Unable to distance myself, I take sides; I confess it and am not sorry. However, each fragment of this huge mosaic is based on a solid documentary foundation. What is told here has happened, although I tell it in my style and manner.
Forty pages of creation myths are followed by many short chapters from less than a page to a couple of pages in length, each headed by the date and place and describing one event and adding another piece to the jigsaw that is the history of the Americas. Sources are given for each chapter, and as well as books written by historians, Galeano has used lots of primary sources, written by people who were actually there. This gives the book a really immediate quality, full of the wonders of this new world, which may not have contained the expected cities made of gold, but did have strawberries and pineapples, rain forests, jaguars and turtles, and of course chocolate.
This volume, which covers the years 1492 to 1700 mostly covers Latin America and the Caribbean since they were the first to be colonised by Europeans, but there are some references to events in North America. Very few Spaniards come out of this book with any credit., but there are a few, Bartolomé de las Casas and Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca among them.
I bought this book after seeing several rave reviews online, and found this unique book a marvellous introduction to the history of an area I didn't know much about.
I did not want to write an objective work—neither wanted to nor could. There is nothing neutral about this historical narration. Unable to distance myself, I take sides; I confess it and am not sorry. However, each fragment of this huge mosaic is based on a solid documentary foundation. What is told here has happened, although I tell it in my style and manner.
Forty pages of creation myths are followed by many short chapters from less than a page to a couple of pages in length, each headed by the date and place and describing one event and adding another piece to the jigsaw that is the history of the Americas. Sources are given for each chapter, and as well as books written by historians, Galeano has used lots of primary sources, written by people who were actually there. This gives the book a really immediate quality, full of the wonders of this new world, which may not have contained the expected cities made of gold, but did have strawberries and pineapples, rain forests, jaguars and turtles, and of course chocolate.
This volume, which covers the years 1492 to 1700 mostly covers Latin America and the Caribbean since they were the first to be colonised by Europeans, but there are some references to events in North America. Very few Spaniards come out of this book with any credit., but there are a few, Bartolomé de las Casas and Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca among them.
I bought this book after seeing several rave reviews online, and found this unique book a marvellous introduction to the history of an area I didn't know much about.
